Brooklyn City Council member Inez Barron (D – Brownsville, Canarsie, East Flatbush, East New York, Jamaica Bay) has so far raised more in total campaign funds than her challenger, Mawuli Hormeku, but Hormeku stands to receive far more in city matching funds because he has raised a greater amount of small donations that qualify for the city’s 6-to-1 match than Barron has, Stephen Witt reports in Kings County Politics.

While it appears Barron outraised Hormeku, a closer look at the filing [with the City Campaign Finance Board] reveals that $17,600 of Hormeku’s fundraising is eligible for the maximum amount of $6-to-$1 matching dollars in the city’s public financing system, meaning the city will add $90,000 to his campaign war chest the first week of August.

Barron, on the other hand, only raised $8,850 in matching dollars and thus will only gain $51,100 in matching funds. So taking in this criteria, Hormeku will not only have more money to spend in the primary race against Barron, but has also shown grassroots strength in that the majority of the money he raised came in small and local donations.

“I call this Economic Karma, I’ve invested so much into my community that it only makes sense that they would want to invest in me,” said Hormeku.

Witt writes in Kings County Politics that Inez Barron, along with her husband Assemblymember Charles Barron, “have long had a political stronghold in the East New York area of Brooklyn.” Brownsville-born Hormeku, he says, is “part of the new wave of young black professionals consisting of highly-educated and home-grown leaders returning to the neighborhoods which raised them, and making the case for community self-empowerment.”

As the White House urged Congress to withhold $600 million in nutrition assistance to Puerto Rico, officials responded angrily that this is only the latest in a series of President Trump’s attempts to stop the flow of federal aid to the island, El Nuevo Día reports. Political analyst Domingo Emanuelli found the Trump government's actions “barbaric,” and urged Puerto Rican Republicans to reconsider their allegiance. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said: “I shouted against Trump’s abuses from the start while others were chummy with him. Trump is not the plantation owner and we are not his slaves.” Link to original story →

The Indigenous Peoples March being held in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 18, a day ahead of the Women's March, will bring together groups from Puerto Rico to South America and Central America, reports Remezcla, to focus attention on issues from voter suppression to human trafficking to police brutality to what is called an “environmental holocaust” by activists. “I think it’s a collective cry for help because we’re in a time of crisis that we have not seen in a very long time,” says Nathalie Farfan, an Ecuadorean Indigenous woman and event organizer. Link to original story →

After vowing to create a more inclusive school system in North Carolina, the Durham Board of Education introduced a new department of second language services to serve newly-arrived immigrants who don’t speak English as a first language, Qué Pasa Noticias reports. One of the main goals of the initiative will be to coordinate a translation and interpretation system to help families participate in their children’s education. “As our Latinx population keeps growing we keep opening our schools’ doors to those arriving from all over the world,” said Superintendent Pascal Mubenga. Link to original story →

With Sen. Kamala Harris expected to announce her decision on a presidential run, The American Bazaar asks members of the Indian-American community about the potential candidacy of the California native. While some celebrated the possibility of Harris, who is of Jamaican-Indian descent, running amid the current political atmosphere, others say the country is "still not ready for a female president and certainly not a non-white." Link to original story →